Cooperative Catalyst Week in Review: 01/03-01/09/11

What a great first week of 2011 for the Cooperative Catalyst, 12 new posts and 2,225 views! Please welcome all our new members as we gained a handful of amazing change agents this week! Don’t forget to join our facebook page!

I thought I’d toss in some over-the-top satire regarding education reform: Back then, kids could learn valuable job skills – and in their bare feet, nonetheless! Let’s not spend too much time trying to analyze the data. True, Shanghai is a magnet with China’s top students and the U.S. tested students from all walks of… [Read more…]

Through one of our fora, Coöp members have been sharing ideas about cross-posting back and forth between CoöpCatalyst and our personal blogs. To further that discussion and invite the broader Coöp community to join in it, I thought I would cross post part of a recent Classroots.org piece on principles of school funding. …considering our… [Read more…]

This is cross-posted from my Philly Teacher blog. I felt that it should be part of the conversation here, too. —————————————————————————————————————————————————– I recently read an article entitled, “Education’s Status Quo to Parents: How Dare You Use the Parent Trigger and Make Decisions!” on the blog Dropout Nation. I won’t get into the details of the… [Read more…]

The Internet has changed the way we read. There is no doubt about it. Nicholas Carr, in his book What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains? The Shallows says, “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Some… [Read more…]

“Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.” Albert Einstein Just imagine you are a school principal and you attend a meeting with the superintendent and other principals across your district. You learn from the “accountability person” that a KPI (key performance indicator) for your district… [Read more…]

My eighth grade students are designing eco-friendly homes. Using their netbooks, they’ve done research, created a blog, contacted certain contractors and worked on the sketches. Mathematically, they find the volume and surface area to help figure out the cost to cool and heat it (many groups built their homes underground). Nothing innovative, I realize. However,… [Read more…]

What tools support a socio-constructivist approach to Project-based Learning? Assumptions We believe in kids. That’s why we are in this ‘business’ of education in the first place. Yet, much of what we must face relegates us, and the students, to roles and responsibilities that are in discord with this belief. Further to that, I believe… [Read more…]

The Simplicity of Life and the Complexity of Learning In about two weeks, my time at Goddard College will officially be over, with a thesis presentation, graduation ceremony, and hopefully one last wonderful night of celebration, with those whose educational passions are similar to mine. And as that moment approached, I am reminded with… [Read more…]

When I was invited to join this blog, I had lots of ideas what should my first post be about — death to subject silos, put a stop to age segregation, pull parents and even the community into the learning, etc. While I would still like to bring a parent perspective on these important topics,… [Read more…]

Background: I work at a progressive independent school in Seattle called Puget Sound Community School. We offer a full slate of classes that can help students earn credits towards a Washington State diploma, but we do not require students to take any academic classes. Some observers have a problem with this. * * * On… [Read more…]

I wrote yesterday about the concept of the Adjacent Possible, featured in Steven Johnson’s new book, “Where Good Ideas Come From”. I’ve thought for the past 24 hours about how I may have encountered the effect of this idea in my own attempts to move innovative ideas through our local school district. A few years… [Read more…]

Take a look at this Educational Manifesto, created by a group of educational reformers and leaders and published in The Washington Post. As an educational reformer myself, I read this manifesto with great interest. There were parts I agreed with strongly. Such as this: “It’s time for all of the adults — superintendents, educators, elected… [Read more…]